Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?

I wonder how many people, as I did, found themselves thrown into confusion by the death last week of Jean Ichbiah (pictured), inventor of Ada.

Learning that the inventor of a computer programming language is already old enough to have lived 66 years (Ichbiah was 66 when he succumbed to brain cancer) is a little like learning that your 11-year-old daughter has grown up and left home or that the first car you ever bought no longer is legal because it runs on gasoline in an age where all automobiles must run on water. How can something as novel, as new, as a computing language possibly already be so old-fangled that an early practitioner like Ichbiah can already no longer be with us?

The thought was so disquieting that it took me immediately back to the last time I wrote about Ichbiah, and indeed about Ada Lovelace for whom his language was named. It was in the context of my quest a couple of years ago to identify the Top Twenty Software People in the World.

It began as an innocent enough exercise, inadvertently kick-started by Tim Bray writing in his popular "Ongoing" blog about how he rated Google's Adam Bosworth as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world." Already famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and Internet Explorer 4 even before he joined BEA as VP of engineering in 2001, when BEA bought Crossgain, the company he'd by then cofounded after leaving Microsoft, Bosworth went on to become BEA's chief architect before leaving to join Google. Definitely a shoo-in for the Top Twenty then. But the question naturally arose - or at least it did in my mind - who are the other 19?

But what about those who came before, the precursors of the current crop of talent? I wrote at the time:

"Can a list of the Top 20 i-Technologists possibly be compiled that doesn't cause the online equivalent of fistfights when published? Obviously not. But that shouldn't deter us from trying."

My inbox soon began to fill up with a deluge of nominations, and within days I was able to list forty mind-bogglingly gifted candidates, as follows (click on the name for a brief description of the individual concerned):

Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web

Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google

Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language

Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google

It was at this point that the name of The Father of Ada was thrown into the hopper, along with that of Ada Lovelace herself. How could I possibly not have already included Jean Ichbiah, many wrote to say? Indeed the one new submission was more indignant than the next, and I soon expanded the list of candidates from forty to one hundred, by adding the following sixty:

Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems

Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape

Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine'

Now we all know that there are others, that this list of 100 candidates barely scratches the surface, so....have at it: who's been left out? Once I have compiled a definitive list of, say, 150, I will devise a means by which we can vote and decide once and for all which 99 should join Adam Bosworth (who, for the record, loathes the whole idea of any such exercise, as does Tim Bray - who calls such popularity contests "moronic"; both would I am quite certain wish me to record here that this entire exercise owes nothing to their actual input, only to Tim's blogged remark en passant all those years ago...)

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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Bill Gates was a "hero of i-Technology" and I didn't know? What technology did he invented?

kjell krona02/06/07 01:03:36 PM EST

In your list of IT heroes, I am missing some of the important people involved in the Graphical User Interface, as first instantiated in Macintosh UI (and later was copied by Microsoft):
Douglas Engelbart, who at SRI in the 60's invented, among other things, the idea of a mouse, overlapping windows, hypertext, outlining, video collaboration, and many other things that later inspired a lot of people to improve interaction with computers;
Larry Tesler, who at Xerox Parc (working with Alan Kay on Smalltalk) invented among other things the modeless editor and, I believe, cut/copy/paste, and later moved to Apple and worked on the Lisa and Macintosh;
Bill Atkinson, who wrote the "Quickdraw" graphics layer in Macintosh, proving that advanced bitmapped graphics was possible on a low-end processor; the orignal MacPaint, basically the predecessor to Photoshop, without which the graphical world today would be lost; and Apple HyperCard, which with its successors showed what "user programming" could mean, and accustomed people to the idea of "linking" pieces of information with clickable buttons, which subsequently exploded in the World Wide Web.

The word "hero" should of course be used sparingly, and probably not in adjunction to "tech", but JWZ holds his place among the Big Hackers, IMHO.

Some of his accomplishments, in no particular order:
* XEmacs. He was one of (the?) main people making a user-friendly version of GNU Emacs.
* XKeyCaps. This little application has really helped me getting a sane keyboard layout under X a few times.
* Mosaic. I believe he was the main hacker on the Unix version of the first "real" browser. And one of the first employees at Netscape.

Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is a hero? I only know him from reading his comments in the Netscape keyboard resource file when I was trying to get the browser to behave under Linux. These left me with a permanent dislike for the dude: instead of explaining the format of the file, he put in lengthy sarcastic (and misinformed) rants about the "mistakes" made by various Unix vendors in designing their keyboards.

Ron Blessing02/05/07 01:36:09 PM EST

Every time I see one of the computer Hall of Fame articles in a magazine
it seems to me there is always one glaring omission. I know there are
many that have contributed but I feel like there are two people that
deserve to be mentioned and always seem to be missed. Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess, in my opinion, started what eventually led to our
current Internet when they launched the first dialup Bulletin Board
system called CBBS. In addition, Ward developed the first widespread
file transfer protocol, XMODEM, which allowed files to be transferred
error free between bulletin boards around the world.

As for the Renaissance jazz bit, I play the Celtic harp, on which I perform a number of medieval and renaissance pieces. I once had an instructor who taught me some great improvisational skills, and thus the phrase, Renaissance jazz, for I like to do riffs off of really old themes.

I think I would have been an itinerant musician or a priest if I were not doing software :-)

You have to include Claude Shannon, and you might want to consider Oliver Selfridge. Shannon was the mathematician who figured information theory, and Selfridge started everything behind neural networks--which have never caught up with modal programming, but whose promise is unbounded.

Lee Butler02/04/07 09:34:23 PM EST

You should also remember Michael J. Muuss. He developed "ping" and was instrumental in some of the developments of TCP/IP and Unix in the early days. He worked at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.

Carsten Schlemm02/04/07 08:19:22 PM EST

Jeremy,
I am a bit disappointed you forgot Konrad Zuse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuse). His problem is that he doesn't have an Anglosaxon name....
Judge for yourself.

I would nominate Dave Raggett (W3C). Over the years, Dave has been involved in the design of many important Web Technologies, starting with HTML (tables etc.), CSS, VoiceXML, MathML and XForms. He's also the author of Tidy, an important tool for Web developers.

Dave Cutler, while quite brilliant, was hardly the "brains behind VMS". He worked on it, sure. And he contributed a lot. But he didn't create it and wasn't in the early architectural planning; he came along later. Maybe you should say he was "a major contributor to VMS" to be accurate.

ccrmalite02/04/07 05:34:16 PM EST

When discussing the heroes of "I-Technology", no list would be complete without Max Mathews, the pioneering creator of the first digital music systems at Bell Labs in the 1950s upon which all digital music software and research was based. These days, imagining a computer system without music seems impossible yet without Max's work on the Music I-Music V computer music languages, we wouldn't be rocking out on our iTunes while reading this article, let alone creating digitally based music of any kind. For those who don't know Max, remember the end of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", when a dying HAL sings an homage to Max's influential early recording of "Daisy," signifying one of the computer's earliest memories. Kubrick got it right, I strongly suggest you add Max to your list.

Andy Poggio02/04/07 04:43:00 PM EST

Please add Doug Engelbart to your list of heros of i-Technology. If you are unfamiliar with his work, just Google his name or "mother of all demos". Doug and his group at SRI international pioneered many of the things we now take for granted, e.g. hypertext networked documents, videoconferencing, collaborative work, and the mouse.

Agree this is in part a popularity contest. Some of the ones on the original list were influential tech CEOs or Chief Architects in their time, but does that Hall of Fame material?

And if you say "Myrhvold", I think you must also say Bruce and ESR....

Andrew02/04/07 12:33:44 PM EST

Ed De Castro deserves to be on the list as the inventor of the personal computer - The PDP8 was my first personal computer, even if not yours :-)

Jeff LaMarche02/04/07 11:26:11 AM EST

Grace Hopper did not invent COBOL. She absolutely 100% should be on the list, but she should be on the list for what she did do. She invented a language called FLOW-MATIC, which was then later used as the starting point by COBOL, which was (quite obviously) designed by committee wthout any further input from Admiral Hopper. She later used COBOL, but she had no direct participation in COBOL.

Much more important, though, she came up with the groundbreaking concept that computer programs could be written in a more English-like language rather than in machine code, something we all take for granted now, but which really was one of the key enablers that allowed computers to become what they are today.

Fellowship02/04/07 08:28:41 AM EST

>> There is no genius in JUnit, unless you
>> count the hype machine that culimated in
>> Kent Beck's name appearing on this list.

Didn't Beck become an Agitar Software Fellow a while back? Alberto Savoia, co-founder and CTO of Agitar specifically called him "one of my heroes" - here's a link to the announcement back in '04: http://www.agitar.com/news/pr/20040802.html

there are an awful lot of what I would call purely hardware people. No doubt that they contributed greatly but "software people" they're not.
And Fred Brooks seems to have fallen off of the list.

"Inventor of the Internet" Missing02/04/07 03:08:29 AM EST

Shouldn't Al Gore get a token place in the list?

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

;-)

OOPS02/03/07 05:11:49 PM EST

Bertrand Meyer not on the list? (Eiffel and Design By Contract)

Eric Sarjeant02/03/07 03:33:40 PM EST

I think Ward Cunningham, the creator of the "Wiki" deserves to be added to the list. If not the top 40, then surely the next 60.

Kelly02/03/07 03:32:09 PM EST

Overall, a very reasonable list. Lots of luminaries there. Then I saw "Kent Beck, creator of JUnit and pioneer of XTreme Programming" Ergh! Sorry, I just vomited a little bit, in my mouth... Give me a break! JUnit took what? An afternoon to come up with? There is no genius in JUnit, unless you count the hype machine that culimated in Kent Beck's name appearing on this list.

Wolbdrab02/03/07 03:31:08 PM EST

Glad to see John von Neumann and John Backus recommended.
I would add Nicholas Negroponti and William Gibson(!) (first explorer of cyberspace).

HTMHell02/03/07 12:49:33 PM EST

I would challenge Tim Berners-Lee's positin on this list since it is HTML that has also brought us the Browser Wars, and the subsequent HTML writer's hell of trying to get a page to display properly on all the popular browsers, and all versions thereof.

The name HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language, implies a rich set of features that don't exist in reality

chiew02/03/07 12:48:17 PM EST

Richard Stevens is the most deserving of inclusion in this entire list: everything is based on TCP/IP.

Knoppix Lover02/03/07 12:45:47 PM EST

Has anyone nominated Karl Knopper yet - "Mr Knoppix"? Ah yes they have, I see, he was in the first 40. Quite right!

Dissenter02/03/07 12:43:49 PM EST

Donald Knuth!? Knuth, like a lot of those listed, are just Ivory Tower acadamics with no real applications in industry

Arguably Bill Gates did more for personal computers than most anyone else out there. I would have to point out however that most of what he has done is related to his business ability rather than his software writing abilities.

You know, when I looked at this list, I found myself disappointed. Sure, there are some big important guys, but software is more than about applications and the big picture. It's also about the technology, and creating new abstractions. And in a lot of ways, the guy who first invented debugging is a lot more important to the success of computer science than anybody listed there.

It may be because I'm an old fart, but I remember the excitement of learning each new abstraction, either as I discovered it, or as it was invented. And it seemed to me that the creation of those abstractions are the really great deeds of computer science. Maybe nobody knows who had those break-through moments first, but I'm sure that they occured, and they seem to be to the the Great Moments in computer science.

1) The first guy to think "I shouldn't have to rewire, I should be able to write instructions that rewire it for me" - i.e., the assembler moment

2) The first guy to realize "I'm not just re-wiring this, I'm describing an procedure for it to use" - the FORTRAN moment

3) The first guy to ask "Why can't I used the same procedure from different places in my code" - the subroutine moment

4) The first guy to say "I should be able to use the subroutine in the program it already knows" - the library moment

5) The first guy to ask "Why do I have to be the one writing down the results?" - the printer moment

6) The first guy to realize "This isn't just a calculator, it's also a controller!" - the embedded moment

7) The first guy to realize "This isn't just a calculator, it's also a storage system!" - the database moment

8) The first guy to realize "This isn't just a calculator, it's also a communication system!" - the network moment

9) The first guy to realize "I'm not just submitting instructions for it to process - it's submiting instructions back for me to process!" - the interactive moment

10) The first guy to think "Why can't it do something else while its waiting?" - the multitasking moment

11) The first guy to think "Why can't it show me more context while I work?" - the full-screen moment

And finally...

12) The first guy to think "Man, why can't this thing show me some chicks?" - the porn moment

--
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer

More Here02/03/07 12:34:30 PM EST

How about pioneers like George Boole, John Louis von Neumann, and the 'Forgotten Father of the Computer' John Vincent Atanasoff?

It's nice to see some of the names (from the 70s) of those who advocated "open" systems (V Cerf, B Metcalfe, etc) from

Robert Sawken02/03/07 11:24:59 AM EST

You need to add Ken Olson founder of Digital Equipment Corp. DEC owned the then mini computer market in the 70's and 80's
which was the "windows system alternative to Big Blue" of that time...

The people from DEC and RT-11, TOPS10, VAX, VMS, DECNET are some the major contributors in hardware and software like X-Windows, early Networking, first clustering, wrote much of Windows NT and are the senior developers and architects in a lot of today's technology industry...

Robert Sawken02/03/07 11:24:57 AM EST

You need to add Ken Olson founder of Digital Equipment Corp. DEC owned the then mini computer market in the 70's and 80's
which was the "windows system alternative to Big Blue" of that time...

The people from DEC and RT-11, TOPS10, VAX, VMS, DECNET are some the major contributors in hardware and software like X-Windows, early Networking, first clustering, wrote much of Windows NT and are the senior developers and architects in a lot of today's technology industry...

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Imagine speeding down the highway, zooming past 18-wheelers, SUVs and coupes, when all of a sudden, your brakes give out and your speed increases. Instantly, you think what could be wrong with the car, you pump your breaks and check your dash and there is no sign of stopping. Instant panic washes over you and a fear of dread drowns out the honkin...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.